This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Oh my Lord! How true it is that whoever works for you is paid in troubles! And what a precious price to those who love you if we understand its value.
By a merciful dispensation of Providence university training is almost as costly as it is unprofitable. The majority will thus be always unable to afford it, and will base their opinions on mother wit and current opinion rather than on demonstration.
Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
To embarrass justice by a multiplicity of laws, or to hazard it by confidence in judges, are the opposite rocks on which all civil institutions have been wrecked, and between which legislative wisdom has never yet found an open passage.
The aim is to replace economic oligarchies by the State, which has a will-to-power of its own and is quite as little concerned with the public good; and a will-to-power, moreover, which is not economic but military and therefore much more dangerous to any good folk who have a taste for staying alive. And on the bourgeois side what on earth is the sense of objecting to State control in economic affairs if one accepts private monopolies which have all the economic and technical disadvantages of State monopolies and possibly some others as well?
Simeon ben Azai, sometimes Ben Azai
He who does not engage in reproduction and propagation rises up against scripture and diminishes the Image (of God). For it says: 'For in the image of God he made man" (Gen 1:6) and 'be fruitful and multiply!'(Gen 1:7).
Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle
I was helping Uncle Sam to make dollars. Maybe mine were not as good gold as his, but they looked as well and were cheaper to make.
There is no greater wealth than Virtue, and no greater loss than to forget it.
Will |
Good breeding differs, if at all, from high breeding only as it gracefully remembers the rights of others, rather than gracefully insists on its own rights.
Meaning |
He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper [(candle)] at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.
As like a church and an alehouse, God and the Devil, they many times dwell near together.
A pretty round-faced wench was it, with black eyebrows, a high forehead, a little mouth, and a sharp nose - as fat and plum every part of her as a plover, a skin as sleek and soft as the back of a swan, it doth me good when I remember her. Like a bird she tripped on the ground, and bear out her belly as majestical as an ostrich. With a licorous rolling eye fixed piercing on the earth, and sometimes scornfully darted to the one side, she figured forth a high discontented disdain; much like a prince puffing and storming at the treason of some mighty subject fled lately out of his power...What ist, what ist for a maid fair and fresh to spend a little lip-salve on a hungry lover? My master beat the bush and kept a coil and prattling, but I caught the bird; simplicity and plainess shall carry it away in another world.
When we examine an extraordinary piece of machinery, an astonishing pile of architecture, a well-executed statue, or a highly-finished painting where life and action are imitated, and habit only prevents our mistaking a surface of light and shade for cubical solidity, our ideas are naturally led to think of the extensive genius and talent of the artist. When we study the elements of geometry, we think of Euclid. When we speak of gravitation, we think of Newton. How, then, is it that when we study the works of God in creation, we stop short and do not think of God? It is from the error of the schools in having taught those subjects as accomplishments only and thereby separated the study of them from the Being who is the Author of them.
Willard L. Sperry, fully Willard Learoyd Sperry
Pay it forward with gratuities: This is a good rule of thumb. However, in our day, we sometimes travel several hours to do a funeral because we've worked with other congregations. I’ve done funerals that have paid as if it was my salary, and I’ve had some that barely paid the gas to drive the four hours to do the funeral. Nevertheless, it’s not about the money. It is about honoring that person as much as you can. God will supply all our needs.